The present invention relates to a recording and reproducing device capable of a recording and reproducing video and audio data and more specifically to a recording and reproducing device allowing inputting of characters while recording or reproducing video and audio data.
Recently, information processing devices such as personal computers have been developed, which are capable of processing not only document and image data but also audio and video data. In this connection, there have been a number of methods for dealing with document/image data in relation with audio/video data on the information processing devices.
For example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 7-191978 discloses a document processing device that can record audio data on a specifically marked position within document data and can output the audio data when an instruction is given for reproducing the audio data in the marked position. The operation of the device is briefly outlined as follows: When recording audio data, a recording position corresponding to a position in a document data is specified by a position specifying means. The audio data is then input in timing with the specified position and recorded. The audio recording means records the audio data correspondingly to the specified position of the document data. When reproducing the audio data, the specifying means instructs the beginning of reproducing audio data by specifying a mark indicated thereat. The audio data corresponding to the mark for audio reproduction is read from the audio recording means and output.
On the other hand, some video recording and reproducing applications used on personal computers provides such a user interface that sets a start point of video reproduction by using an indicator (a progress bar) for indicating a relative position of currently reproducing portion in a total time of an entire record.
A conventional video editing device can automatically recognize a scene end (a cut point) of video, indicate a scene end by a plurality of contracted images and edit video data by copying, cutting (deleting), pasting and transferring on the contracted images.
The document processing device described in Japanese Laid-open Publication No. 7-191978 can record any audio data on any desired position within document data and, moreover, can recognize the audio record position by a mark and output the audio data related to the corresponding document data by specifying the reproduction of the audio data with the mark.
The above-described document processing device is effective to add audio data to already recorded document data, but it is not suited to add characters to already recorded audio data.
The user interface using the indicator specifying a video reproducing start in the video recording/reproducing application for a personal computer can not precisely specify a start position when reproducing the video data. In other word, this method cannot easily start the reproduction of the video from a correct portion that the user wants to see first.
The conventional video editing device for editing video data by processing a plurality of contracted images involves problems in connection with a large number of contracted images due to automatic recognition of scene cut points, unrecognizable moderate scene change and difficulty to precisely grasp the scene content by viewing only contracted images.